For quite a long time , i have been working with tortoise SVN, when i took the latest from the repository (after many days), to my goodness i found out many files were in the conflicted state. It takes a lot of time to manually resolve each of them manually.
would someone suggest the best practices /3rd party tools / tips for resolving the same.?
thanks ,
vijay
First: don't wait many days between calls to svn update. Be religious about staying in sync with the trunk, insofar as you can.
Second, related to the first: avoid long-lived branches, if you can. Make a branch, fix a bug, merge it back. Make a branch, refactor a bit, merge it back. It would be handy to be able to make a branch, write a whole feature in it, write all the tests, and integrate everything at once, but that approach is likely to create merge conflicts that svn can't resolve by itself.
Third: consider another source-control tool. Distributed version control systems have their faults, but they tend to have higher-quality merge tools than svn.
I'm not sure I would trust any 3rd party 'silver-bullet' app for resolving merge conflicts. In my experience, the best method is to update as often as is feasible so when you do get conflicts, there may be fewer. As far as resolving conflicts, there's no substitute for you looking at the conflicts and deciding what to do about each one individually.
I do use SourceGear DiffMerge for my merge conflict editor. It makes it a little easier.